This is not the first time that Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, has publicly proclaimed his acute fear of death in the hands of security agents and the federal government. In several fora, Wike has always told whoever cared to listen, that he was being hunted for outright execution, by forces acting under strict orders from Abuja. The Governor who is also a Lawyer, had always failed to render a possible motive behind the alleged FG-sanctIoned assassination moves on his life, or could he bring to the fore, details of the state-sponsored murder plot.

However, in recent times, Wike has added another twist to his self-orchestrated paranoid fiction, by naming names and declaring the motive for FG’s purported attempt at his life. First, he bandied about how the Commander of Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), Akin Fakorede was commissioned by FG to take him down at sight. In another event, he alerted the general public of how the current Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Zaki Ahmed, had a 'mandate' from the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris Kpotum, to kill him (Wike).

Just yesterday, while addressing a group of journalists at the Government House, Port Harcourt, Wike said that IGP Ibrahim Idris, was after after his life. This time, he placed the motive of the said annihilation moves on his political differences with the government of the day.

But the questions that loom large herein are these:

1. Is Wike the only opposition governor in Nigeria?
2. Why should the government single out Wike for state execution?
3. What is the benefit of Wike's death to the government?
4. In official terms, is it actually possible for the IGP to mandate any police officer or group of police officers to assassinate a sitting governor?
5. Do we have a precedent anywhere in Nigeria?
6. Where are the facts to buttress Wike's weighty allegations against the government?

In Social Sciences, facts and figures are the most important tools used in studying human society and individual relationships in the society. Without facts and figures, there is no basis for logical, summative, or even evaluative conclusions; ours would have been a world of perpetual conjecturing.

As a governor, I expect Governor Wike to seek the help of professionals who would guide his public utterances and reduce the growing rate of his saltless presentations. A governor ought to always speak from a standpoint of facts and figures, otherwise, the public might be constrained to draw a correlation between these daily factless rantings about his death in the hands of FG, and the biting psychological problem called 'thanatophobia'. In psychology, thanatophobia is the morbid, abnormal, or persistent fear of one's own death.

- Solomon Okocha